The Canadian Museum of Human Rights has failed its mandate

Irwin Cotler was Canada’s minister of justice and first special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and antisemitism.

Mark L. Berlin is Professor of Practice at McGill University. He resigned this week from his position as a trustee on the museum’s board over the exhibit.

Alan H. Kessel is a former assistant deputy minister and legal adviser at Global Affairs Canada.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is about to do something no national museum should do: present a deeply contested political narrative as settled historical truth.

With its forthcoming exhibition, “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present,” the museum risks breaching its mandate to educate, foster dialogue and deepen public understanding in favour of propaganda masquerading as scholarship.

The issue is not whether Palestinian suffering deserves recognition. It does. The displacement and trauma experienced by Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war form an important chapter of Middle Eastern history deserving serious examination.

The problem is how the museum has chosen to frame that history.

The exhibition’s title signals the central concern. The Nakba – Arabic for “catastrophe” – is commonly understood as referring to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Arab Palestinians during the 1948 war. But the term itself requires historical treatment.

When Syrian historian Constantine Zureiq first popularized al-Nakba in 1948, he used it not merely to describe Arab Palestinian displacement but the broader Arab catastrophe: the military and political failure of the Arab world to prevent the birth of the Jewish state. The catastrophe was not simply that Palestinians became refugees; it was that the Arab campaign to extinguish Israel had failed.

Over time, Nakba became associated with Palestinian dispossession alone. More recently, activist discourse has expanded it to describe an alleged ongoing process in which Israel’s very existence is cast as a continuing catastrophe.

The museum adopts this political framing. On its website, it states that “many people understand the Nakba not only as a past event but as an ongoing process.”

That is not a neutral historical observation. It is a false political proposition. Even where this language is invoked to critique policies such as settlement expansion, it is frequently used more broadly to characterize Israel’s very existence as inherently dispossessive and therefore illegitimate.

By adopting this language, the museum endorses ideology rather than presenting a contested historical concept with scholarly distance. A national museum dedicated to human rights must distinguish between propaganda and historical truth. Historical context matters. The refugee crisis of 1948 did not arise in a vacuum, nor was it simply the inevitable consequence of Israel’s creation. It followed the rejection by Palestinian and Arab leadership of the United Nations partition plan, which proposed both a Jewish state and an Arab state. That plan never came into force because it was rejected and immediately superseded by war.

Jewish leadership accepted partition. Arab leadership rejected it.

That rejection was their right. What was not their right was launching a war aimed at destroying the newly declared Jewish state. Arab leaders spoke openly of a war of annihilation.

The tragedy that followed, including Palestinian displacement, must be understood within that reality.

Yet the museum largely omits this essential context.

Equally troubling is the omission of another refugee story from 1948 and its aftermath: the expulsion or forced flight of approximately 850,000 Jews from Arab countries between 1948 and the early 1970s. These Jewish communities – many millennia old – were dispossessed, uprooted and permanently displaced.

In truth, 1948 produced a double catastrophe: Arab Palestinian displacement resulting from war, and the mass displacement of Jews from Arab lands. Any institution claiming scholarly seriousness must grapple with both.

Instead, the museum privileges one historical memory while marginalizing another.

That is not education. It is curation by omission.

Museums are not activist or propagandistic platforms. They are custodians of public trust. Their role is not to inflame but to illuminate; not to advance ideological narratives but to encourage inquiry, historical nuance and civic understanding.

When museums abandon scholarly neutrality for activism, they become instruments of polarization.

That risk is especially acute today, amid an unprecedented explosion of antisemitism, deep communal fracture and public anxiety.

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights should be helping bridge divides, not deepen them.

A museum devoted to human rights need not avoid difficult subjects. But it must present them with evidence-based inquiry, context, intellectual honesty and moral seriousness.

In this case, it has failed that test. If the museum wishes to contribute meaningfully to public understanding, it must revisit this exhibition’s framing and ensure it reflects historical truth rather than a selective political narrative.

Canadians deserve better from one of their most important public institutions.